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Valuing the Economic Benefit of Ecotourism Areas with Travel Cost Method: A Case Study of Semen Mountain National Park, Ethiopia

Abstract:

Semen Mountain National Park is one of the best-known nature-based recreational sites in Ethiopia, due to its impressive landscape and endemic wild animals despite its being placed in the list of World Heritage in danger since 1996 due to heavy settlement by farmers, the increase in the number of endangered wildlife, widespread deforestation and continuous deterioration in recreational qualities of the site. Thus, there is a need for valuation of the park to know how much value the people attach to the park so as to demonstrate how the site managers can extract a positive net benefit after incurring a cost on maintaining the park and ensuring sustainable and efficient level of operations. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine the recreational economic benefit of the park using Travel Cost Method (TCM). A total of 200 respondents, 140 foreign and 60 local visitors were interviewed face-to-face to collect the data. And then a consumer surplus was estimated. Accordingly, the expected aggregate annual recreational economic benefit gained by on-site visitors during the year 2010/11 was estimated at Birr 48,562,086.4 (approximately US$ 2,943,156.7) but the park authorities collect only 14 percent of this sum. The results indicate that the recreational economic benefits of the park are much larger than what is currently collected by park authorities and thus the park authorities can change the current prices of the services so as to generate extra revenue that would be spent on maintaining the park for its sustainable use